She couldn’t acknowledge her secret fear that the issue wasn’t his inability to acknowledge his deep feelings; no, she worried that he just didn’t have them. After the baby was gone, there was nothing deep connecting them, just passion… And now there was another life.
She gave a bleak little laugh and turned to Maya. ‘I wonder if there are any statistics about the rate of divorce for Vegas marriages?’
‘You sure there is going to be a divorce now?’
Beatrice decided not to acknowledge the doubt she could see in her sister’s eyes. It was a doubt she shared, a doubt she was trying very hard not to confront.
‘I think you need to sit down,’ Maya added, stepping off the pathway and approaching a bench.
It took Beatrice a few moments before she roused herself enough to react to the prompt of her sister patting the seat beside her.
Hunched forward, Beatrice planted her hands on juddering knees.
Maya put one small hand onto one of hers. ‘Tell me to shut up, it’s none of my business, but what happened, Bea?’
‘I found it pencilled into my diary.’
‘What?’
‘An appointment with an IVF specialist,’ she said. Maya was the only one who would know the full significance of that.
Her sister did. ‘Oh, my God, what did you do?’
‘Other than not be like Mum, you mean? Oh, you know me, very subtle and royal to my fingertips. I charged into Dante’s meeting with a room full of the island’s captains of industry and told him that enough was enough. That I didn’t want staff, I didn’t want a diary and that my childbearing hips were not a subject for staff meetings!’
She remembered the white line of fury outlining his sensual lips as he had escorted her from the room.
Beatrice shrugged, her eyes following the antics of a squirrel that was running through the branches of a nearby tree.
‘He called me naive and said I was overreacting.’ The lingering bitterness hardened her voice. ‘I probably was, and, oh…it’s hard to describe what it’s like in the palace.’ She lifted her hands, her long fingers sliding through her silky blonde hair, lifting the tangled strands off her neck before she let it fall in silky waves down her back.
‘I wanted to wait. I didn’t want a baby then. I was still grieving for the one I’d lost… Oh, I know they were only a bundle of cells, but—’
‘Of course you needed time. Didn’t Dante understand how you felt?’
‘I never told him. We didn’t discuss it…or actually anything much. With Carl gone, he was under a lot of pressure. Maybe I’m more like Mum than I thought,’ she mused, remembering her words of moments ago—it would have made him happy.
When did she stop asking herself what would make her happy?
Like her own mother, she had seen what she wanted to; she had put her own needs to one side to please a man.
‘Oh, Bea, you know that’s not true!’
Beatrice’s glance fluttered from her sister’s face across the flash of cheery yellow where winter jasmine was in bloom.
‘I’m going to have a baby.’ She said it like a practice run, imaging herself throwing the line into the conversation, but no, her imagination fell short. It still didn’t feel real. ‘I really do have great timing, don’t I?’
‘I wouldn’t say the timing is just down to you,’ her sister responded drily.
‘I will have to tell Dante.’
Maya’s expression softened into sympathy as she saw the realisation hit home for Beatrice, who began to scrabble for her phone in the bag that was looped across her shoulder.
‘Give yourself time first, to get your own head around it,’ Maya advised, trying to hide the worry she felt behind an encouraging smile.
Beatrice, her teeth worrying at her full lower lip, shook her head. The way she felt right now, that moment might never come and the longer she left it—well, it was never going to get any easier.
‘Do I have to tell him?’ she said with a surge of wild hope that vanished into guilt as she connected with the sympathy in her sister’s eyes. ‘I didn’t mean that. It’s just that everything will change. This baby is second in line to the throne.’ It seemed like a terrible responsibility to give a child before they were even born. ‘Dante had a bad childhood, you know, and now this baby will be brought up in that world…’